Tense anchoring in Chinese

In this paper, we relate the so-called incompleteness effects observed in Chinese to a failure of anchoring tense, i.e., to guarantee a proper temporal reference of a given sentence through syntactic measures. Based on an insight from S. Huangʹs (2005) plurality analysis of eventuality predicates, we propose to analyze tense anchoring as a process of spelling out an underlying event argument by a variety of morpho-syntactic means. This process may involve event coordination, event subordination, event modification, event quantification, or verb raising to v/T. Furthermore, a three-layered analysis of aspectual projections is adopted to account for a disparity between syntactic and semantic groupings of Chinese aspects, in that syntax and semantics may indeed have different agendas towards securing a temporal reference in grammatical terms. As a result, a unified account can be provided for the incompleteness effects typically associated with middle and inner aspects.